CHAPTER FOUR - HENRY'S POV
Summary: Henry had learned not to ask questions. Until you landed like a knife against his throat.
What were you, feral untamed beast that you were, about to do?
Pair: Henry Creel/Vecna/001 x Female Reader
Content/Warning Labels: Henry Creel POV, slow burn darkfic, Hawkins Lab, angst, intrigue, manipulation/Brenner, violence/death, torture/injury, inner conflict, eventual smut - age gap
(Part One - Part Two - Part Three)
He had a heart that could have held the entire empire of the world; and, in the end, he had to content himself with a cellar.
– Gaston Leroux, The Phantom of the Opera.
Henry had learned not to ask questions.
He’d learned the hard way. The way that strips you apart piece by wretched piece.
Curiosity had a cost, and it was one he could not afford. There was safety in omission, even if it that safety was a tilted illusion.
There was structure in ignorance.
And Henry's life was a wired structure. Bound, rigid, unyielding. One he could not break from. One he could not let curiously dismantle.
He’d constructed himself into the kind of order which was forced upon him, and that order was vital to his survival. Vital to what was left of his sanity.
Every day came with monotonous regularity.
Wake. Wash. Dress. Breakfast, which would’ve been more aptly named colourless fuel.
Patrol. Station. Supervisions. Sparse interactions. Report.
Dinner. Undress. Stare at the ceiling plaster.
Sleep, if he was fortunate. Insomnia, more often than not.
He’d learned the hard way not to swipe sleeping pills from the nurses station. That one had earned him a disciplinary sanction. And if there was one thing Martin Brenner loved inflicting, it was discipline.
Punishment. Preferably painful, preferably with an audience.
Now, Henry merely accepted whatever the shade of night offered, whether that be the brief reprieve of sleep or the drawn out suffering of the dark.
Regardless, every morning was the same, and hued with the same sharp fluorescents.
That morning was no different.
He woke from a shapeless dream to the dull buzzing of the alarm. Stepped out into frigid clinic air. Showered in the dim light. Donned his meticulously ironed white uniform. Laced his black shoes. Checked himself in the small mirror.
Only long enough to deem himself acceptable. Not long enough to find questions in the cascades of his cheeks or the hollow of his throat. The more he looked at himself the more he seemed to blur into an unnameable shape, a mass of pale and blonde with a hint of blue.
He ate flavorless oatmeal in the staff mess hall. Plain, one spoonful of yoghurt.
No one spoke to him, and he preferred it that way.
Talking opened doors. Talking created curiosity. The kind that had a cost.
Henry wasn’t a stranger to being regarded as the odd loner, the one that made the air in the room tilted and uncomfortable. He’d become accustomed to it. Lack of conversations meant the retention of his usual routine. Which was far preferable to the performative idle discourse that he heard others partake in.
He needed the structure. He needed the monotony.
That morning had been like any other. Stable.
Until your arrival landed like a knife against his throat.
Henry observed everything.
He observed as you cowered behind Brenner’s back, half hidden, with the face of someone who didn't know how to be human.
He’d thought you yet another wayward child, until he’d flicked his eyes over you properly.
An adult with the pale limbs and buzzed hair that informed all of Martin Brenner’s pets.
One glance was enough for Henry to recognize every agony on your face.
Uncertainty. Fear. Confusion. He’d seen it before on every other face, every other subject. But there was something darker, something lurking in the confines of your mind, leaking out of your irises.
Alluring, though he refused to entertain the word.
“This is Nineteen.” Brenner said brightly.
It was a statement, a fact. Not an invitation for curiosity. Yet Henry was curious all the same, even though he couldn't afford to be. Even though it coiled his insides in barbed wire.
You were twisting that wire. Every glance you made around the room. Not shy, but carefully deducting. Every comment you made to one of the younger subjects. Not warm, but honest.
As he observed you, looking like you were trying your hardest to simply exist, he felt it.
But familiarity was a candle with an even shorter wick than curiosity, and he refused to light it.
Henry moved in careful, practiced paces. Every step ordered and purposeful. He was mostly a silent ward; observing behaviour, assisting with testing, dutifully carrying out rounds and rigid procedures.
The children mostly avoided him. A few of them were receptive towards him, a couple of them even warmly so, he supposed. Mainly 011, who reminded him of a small bird and a type of innocence he’d never known.
He pretended not to watch you.
He averted his gaze when he realized he’d almost memorized the furrows in your brow. He was looking too long. He was wondering, and wondering led to disorder.
Henry checked his watch. Thirty more minutes of supervision. He could do that. He could will himself into not being distracted for another half hour.
That was, until you provided one he could not ignore.
Because the next time he looked at you, you were somehow crooked. Not physically, but the air around you. The way your breathing was wracking your body all of a sudden, like you’d forgotten how to use your lungs.
Then, you’d shot to your feet. It was unexpected enough make his composure wane, to make his eyebrows flick upward a fraction on his stoic face.
What were you about to do? Feral, untamed beast that you were?
It was nothing violent, nothing chaotic. Nothing that set the hairs on his neck to stiffen.
It was just panic. The cold kind he knew well, the kind he'd learned to keep locked in the cellar of himself a long time ago.
Henry watched you fly out of the room, feet pounding the linoleum, doors flying open under your palms.
He hesitated. Reached for his pager. His fingers were curling around it, resting on the number for the guards, when he felt a tug on his sleeve cuff.
“Is she okay?” He asked with that childish lilt in his voice.
The genuine concern in his voice was too apparent.
Henry's finger slid to another number instead. Brenner’s. He wouldn’t make your first memory in this room more violent than it already was.
He leaned down, resting his palms on his knees.
“Shall we find her?” His voice was melodic, gentle. The way it always was with innocent things.
012 nodded, and grabbed his wrist with tiny fingers. The small warmth of his miniature hand was enough to make Henry flinch.
When they made their way into the clinical corridors, you were far beyond, your feet having flown you to some lost corner. Henry and 012 strode urgently down the halls, around the corners, poking their heads into rooms quietly as not to draw attention.
Brenner appeared from his office with his signature long, methodical strides.
“She panicked.” Henry said quietly.
Brenner nodded stiffly, his eyes making note of 012 and his tiny hand clasped around Henry’s. He placed the entirety of his attention on the child.
“Don’t worry Twelve, we will find your sister.” Brenner smiled.
Brenner checked more rooms as Henry and 012 sped ahead through the halls.
Curled into the corner against the fire escape door, meek against the metal. Your head clasped in shaking arms, your back rising roughly with every panicked gasp.
Something tightened in Henry's chest. He couldn't name it. He didn’t want to name it.
As he watched Brenner pick you up from the floor, he felt an odd, tiny flicker as Brenner’s hands touched you.
He didn't know, but it went as quickly as it came.
When you returned Henry's gaze, there was something underneath the fear in your eyes. A piece of your mind with nowhere to go. He saw it, felt it lurch against his own irises as you passed.
He watched silently as Brenner led you away, his eyes lingering on Brenner's stiff hand at the back of your neck.
“We found her.” 012 smiled, squeezing Henry’s hand happily.
Henry smiled softly, leaning down. “You did a great job.”
“You too, Mister Peter.” 012 grinned. “Papa will look after her now, won’t he?”
Henry’s jaw flexed in the way a child would never notice.
“Of course.” He said, the words souring his teeth as they passed.
You were an experiment. You were a subject.
And you were a thorn in Henry’s otherwise perfectly rigid side. One that attempted to pierce a tiny hole in him every time he watched you from across the room, every time he passed you silently on patrol.
He watched you carefully, not long enough to draw your attention. Until curiosity began to make him careless, and you kept catching his gaze.
Henry couldn’t pinpoint exactly when you’d become the main cause of his insomnia, the reason for his staring at the ceiling all night. It started slowly, in the way he could blame general sleeplessness at first. But eventually, it was obvious.
And sense was all Henry had to cling to in the god-forsaken white walls of the lab.
Why were you, an adult, here? You weren’t born here, like the others. You weren’t some runaway Brenner’s dogs had viciously sniffed out from hiding.
You felt like the outside world. Rugged at the edges. Winter-paled in a way that looked like a lack of sun rather than a lifetime of fluorescent lights.
Like colour would have come back to you if it could.
Henry tossed and turned, his nights filled with repetitive questions, each scenario making less sense than the last.
Until one day when he woke, and silent curiosity was no longer enough.
He had to know. He had to stem the intrigue of his own mind from running rampant any longer.
Henry could tell he made you nervous. He had that effect on people. But usually, it was because they were uncomfortable. Wary. You were nervous in a way that told him you knew he was analyzing you from the first word.
Rolling that softball around. Even in your hospital gown and buzzed scalp you didn’t look like you belonged here.
You seemed so far removed from the others, who were so young in years and minds. They had eyes that hadn’t seen anything but the white walls and the manipulating faces of science.
It started creeping up Henry’s spine as soon as you mentioned your “accident”.
Brenner was purposeful. Every lie was carefully curated, and this wasn’t an exception. Adults didn’t just develop psychokinetic abilities after brain trauma.
The others were made. Curated just like Brenner’s lies. Which made you even more of an enigma.
If Brenner was making adult subjects, why were you the only one? Were you some sort of benchmark, patient zero?
Henry wanted to dissect you. Look at every synapse under a microscope, explore every blood vessel.
For now he settled on listening. Speaking. Carefully, of course. Brenner had eyes and ears everywhere. He’d be a fool to say anything that fell outside of the confines of his role.
Henry could feel the way your mind pulled at you. He could see the way it warped and plagued behind your eyes.
You were… surprisingly combative, for someone so lost. It made him feel something sideways of reckless. He hadn't been challenged for a long time.
He was sundered by feeling anything at all, frankly. Anything other than the monotonous drum of his heart which felt only partially alive at any given moment.
Then, your fingertips ghosted across his.
It was immediate. Unmissable.
The force Henry felt, the pull he had to contain before it spread throughout him like a disease.
The words he'd spoken rang through his head as he left you standing there.
Everyone here is a wounded animal.
Despite Henry’s calculated attempts at avoidance, it seemed the lab, or Brenner, or some sort of twisted humor of fate kept magnetizing him to you.
As if it reveled in watching him squirm against painful inner conflict.
It called him into the testing room.
It made that unnamable thing tighten inside him as he saw you once again broken on the linoleum. It made him want to step closer, and flee as far as he possibly could.
Martin Brenner was a bloodhound. And Henry knew your memories wouldn’t stay hidden forever. He needed more time. To figure you out. To discover what had really happened behind the smoke show of Brenner’s lies.
On the way back to your room, he knew he was walking to close. He could feel the static warmth pressing between the two of you, strangling him as you paced quietly through the halls.
It was a leech that drew his voice from his mouth before he could stop it. He knew conversation was dangerous. He knew it opened doors that he shouldn’t walk through.
But then, he walked through yours. It was automatic, instinctive, a gravity he couldn’t combat.
“Why do you care what happens to me?” Your voice wasn't accusatory, or spiteful. It was raw curiosity, mirroring his own.
Henry could feel your pieces. Crooked, jagged pieces of a person that wouldn't fit together right. Frayed at the edges, spilling ash. You felt like a memory his skin wanted to forget.
While you were looking at yourself in the mirror, he was looking at the line of your jaw. The soft pulse jumping beneath it. Tracing the line of your fingers as they fell across your neck.
“I don’t think I always looked like this.”
But he couldn’t tell you that.
Instead he just studied you, calm and measured as always. Until he wasn’t.
Until he was imagining you before this nightmare of a place. With colour in your cheeks. With life on your face.
Until he was imagining you -
Henry drew in a sharp but quiet breath, watching as you sank down onto the side of the bed.
Imagination was a thing more dangerous than curiosity.
It plagued Henry almost more than the question of your being here. It pulled at his mind as he tried to operate with the reliable, rigid monotony that he hoped would stem it.
His need to know more about you was incessant. You were becoming a fixation, and he knew it would unstitch him if he let it.
So he clung harder to his structure. Eat. Work. Sleep. Converse only when necessary. Avoid anything more than clipped, controlled sentences. Don’t look to long.
But each time he saw you was a artificer's chisel, chipping away at his control splinter by splinter.
The rainbow room was quiet. And you looked like someone on the edge of a building, considering your options.
His feet were moving toward you before he could register the steps.
Your voice was quietly pained, and it made his fingertips numb.
“How do I sort out the memories from the nightmares?”
Henry didn't have the answer. All he had was half-answers that were veiled in the shadows of himself.
Again you embered the furnace of his curiosity. What nightmares plagued you? What memories were shattered through you like shards of glass needing plucked out?
What had you seen? What writhed in the darkest parts of your mind?
The thought made his stomach shift uncomfortably. Or was it warmth? He’d never learned the difference.
Then, the song stuttered out of the speakers. Distorted and broken and sliding through him like a javelin.
Hold me tight… Tell me… miss me… I'm alone… as can be… dream… dream of me…
He felt himself react. Rigid in a way that was too much, even for him. His face was acting alone, holding a expression too grave for you to ignore.
He saw the scene behind his eyes.
Violent flashes. Blood. Dining table. Bones. Stained glass rose. Bodies. Floorboards beneath him collapsing into blackness.
And he could feel your eyes on him. Trying to dissect the same way he did. He had to force himself back into the room with every once of strength he had.
“Did I do that then?” He heard you ask, but it sounded hollow in his ears.
But that song. Here, in this place. Why?
Suddenly, you were a weapon. And you didn’t even know it.
Were you put here to taunt him? To threaten him with ghosts and the dark, demented shades of himself?
Was it purposeful? A sick experiment of Brenner’s? Were you… made to break Henry? A bespoke beast just for him?
You were labyrinthian, and he was standing at the entrance, torch lit.
To step inside might be suicide. It might be salvation.
Either way, it would release him.
Chess was Henry’s favourite.
And he couldn’t deny the satisfaction of out-maneuvering you.
He could feel your focus waning with every move. He caught every time your eyes fell across his pale fingers. Curious.
Henry was learning that it wasn’t in your nature to roll over. You wanted things to bend to you, to break. You certainly weren’t going to accept defeat easily.
As soon as you slipped into the void he could feel you. Lingering behind him like a shadow.
He knew the feeling well, and truthfully, he was intrigued at how much understanding you had for your powers in only months of exploring them.
You could’ve been Brenner’s new prodigy, if you weren’t so opposed to performing under pressure.
Every moment was giving him something new to learn. Some type of intrigue. But his deductions were cut short when Brenner entered the room to announce the group test.
Henry caught his eyeline just as he stood up from the chess board. Brenner's eyes were still but framed in the way Henry knew to be calculating.
Had he been sitting too close? Leaning in too far? His mind raced as he resumed his usual posture with practiced ease, hands clasped in front of him, falling in to step behind the subjects as they moved through the halls in ordered lines.
When it was your turn to perform, Henry took his time.
Carefully fit the electrodes over your head.
He brushed his fingertips over the very top of your ears unconsciously, some silent part of himself desperate to make contact with you again.
He pretended to adjust the connections so that he could spend a fraction longer studying your face.
When had he passed the point of curiosity and found himself at the point of caring? Some time between wake and sleep, he supposed. Some quiet moment that had slipped over him like a veil, unnoticed until it wasn't.
Henry knew you had power. He knew you had something dark toiling inside of you.
But he had never expected the scene that spilled forth from you.
The sheer magnitude of power that erupted through the room. The force of Two slamming into the wall. The sharp shattering of the glass.
And in the middle of the chaos, you. Consumed by fear as you cowered under the strength of yourself.
It wasn't the violence that twisted like a knife in Henry's gut. It wasn't the crushed bodies of the guards leaking crimson onto the tile.
It was the way you shrieked.
It was the way your eyes were screaming silent pleas into his.
It was the way you looked as you were set alight and dragged, lifeless through the debris.
Tormented, helpless, broken.
It wasn't what you'd done. It was the familiarity, shooting through him like a cold splinter.
Henry didn't know what had happened to you.
Brenner had instructed him to return to the rainbow room with the children and the other orderlies.
002 was sent to the infirmary, though he didn't spend long there, quickly recovering from the bruising to his head and chest.
Henry listened silently as he spewed his vitriol to the others his age. That you were nothing but a useless, psychopathic basket case with no grip on her abilities. How he would get his revenge when he had the chance.
Still, Henry didn't see you for days.
It plagued his nights, pulling at him in a way that he had never been pulled before.
He felt twisted, outside of himself. He could feel his rigidness inching into recklessness with each hour that passed.
When he heard his colleagues mention your name in hushed tones against the coffee machine, his chest tightened.
“Yes…. infirmary…. surprised she woke up….”
He didn’t react. He finished his breakfast. He washed his dishes.
Silent. Composed. Controlled.
He waited. He did his duties to the letter. Took his notes diligently during testings. Supervised like a hawk.
Though every painstaking minute dragged through him, his chest tightening with each one that passed.
The decision made itself for him.
Henry returned to his room, just like every other night.
He waited. Sitting on the edge of his bed like a statue, his limbs weighted like marble, his fists curled white-knuckled on his knees. He watched the clock. The hands seemed to move purposefully slowly, like they were spiting him.
He knew what time the night security staff would go on break. He knew that for a fleeting period, no one would be looking at the monitors.
When the clock clicked softly over into midnight, he moved. He hovered at his door, opening it just a crack, listening into the halls.
He heard the sound of the coffee machine gurgle faintly down from the staff kitchen. That was his cue.
He moved swiftly, quietly, a phantom though the darkened halls. His shadow moved oddly across the tiles in the dark, warped and crooked. He went efficiently, sweeping through the maze that he knew like the back of his hand.
He hovered at the door of the infirmary wing, flattening himself in the corner and glancing through the window until the guard inside moved into another section.
He flashed his access card at the reader, and slid inside unnoticed.
The guards were distracted, talking among themselves down a length of corridor.
Henry peered into every room, scanning each precisely. Until he saw a shape in the dark, shifting in a bed in one of the rooms.
With one last crane over his shoulder he slipped inside, clicking the door softly behind him.
God, he hated that name. But it didn’t matter. You were awake, you were talking.
But you looked wrecked. More injured than you had been from just the glass and the tasers. More confused and destroyed than you had since he’d first seen you.
Something awful and sharp was twisting under his ribs as he took you in, cataloguing every wound. Angry burn marks on your temples. Scabbed cuts across your cheeks and forehead. Purple bruises lashed around your wrists.
You didn’t even know how long you’d be here.
Henry felt a sickness crawling through him. You looked like a memory. A nightmare. One he’d woken from many times.
“I thought you might not be coming back.”
“You thought… I was dead?”
Henry was taken aback at your surprise. How did you not already know the kind of place you were in? The kind of man Brenner was?
“Don't tell me you're this blind Nineteen. If he thinks he can’t control you-”
“He already threatened to take away my abilities.” You said. “Some chip thing.”
A concentrated pain seared through Henry’s jugular.
Was that the worst you thought Brenner capable of?
“Right, yes, that. But Nineteen, he will not hesitate to discard you if he thinks you too unpredictable.”
Your eyes dropped. They were dark, somber, exhausted.
“Maybe that wouldn’t be so terrible.”
A knife wrenched inside of him. He almost glared at you. Angry, at first. Then something smaller, and much worse.
“I just mean… what kind of existence is this?”
Henry watched as your eyes grew damp in the dim light. His own were intense, his neck prickling with a sense of panic at your lack of concern for your own life.
“Do not say things like that.”
“You don't know what it's like, Peter.” You snapped. “You know who you are. You can leave any time you want.”
Henry wanted to shout. He wanted to shake you. He wanted to hold you. He wanted to burn this place to the ground with everyone in it.
“What happened? In the testing room? What did you see?”
“A man. The same man. Saying I was useless, choking me. Once it started I couldn't stop it.”
He watched your fingers drag across your throat like they were remembering.
His stomach wrenched again. Your memories were nightmares, just like his. They were wretched and shattered and aching. Lurking in your darkness corners and reducing you to ashes whenever they wanted.
Only, you didn’t remember like he did. You couldn’t make sense of them. And that was worse.
Henry moved closer before he could stop himself.
“I know what it is to be different. To be a wounded animal. To lose yourself.” He said.
He felt how your eyes were swimming against his, searching for a place to anchor.
“Did you ever find yourself again?” Your voice was tiny.
As you sat up and let your legs fall over the edge of the bed, Henry’s eyes dropped inexplicably for a fraction of a second, cataloguing the shape of your calves.
“Then I'll look with you.”
It was a mercy. The kind he'd never held. The kind he felt disgusted at himself to need. Here you were, bruised and broken and on the very edge of yourself. Caring about him.
He didn’t know what to do with the feeling. He didn’t know how to hold the simmer behind his ribs. It made him want to remove every single one of them to stop the feeling.
“You're the only person who has seen me as more than the wound that I am.” You said.
Seen you. Was that what he had done? In all his silent analysis, quiet searching, endless inner questions?
Had he opened the blinds? Watched as you toiled outside? Invited you in?
Henry’s feet again brought him closer before he could question it. The way you looked… the way you looked at him. It was an anchor, dragging him forward.
Then you moved. Only your hand. A small gesture.
One he’d both craved and avoided for weeks.
It was immediate, the static force that shot through him once again. It spun through his fingers, trailed up his arm, made him flinch.
He wanted to pull his hand away. He wanted to grip you tighter. He was a tide, pulling and dragging, two halves of something monumental and uncertain.
This was more than curiosity. It was more than intrigue.
It was reckless, a precipice.
Henry could see the red light of the camera blinking in his peripheral vision. Security would be back soon, if not already.
Your grip tightened. “Don’t.”
He was silent, not knowing how to answer your pleas. Not knowing how to hold them. Not knowing what he would do next.
The camera kept blinking. He didn't drop your hand.
It was warm. An asylum. Your fingers looked like they belonged there.
His eyes squeezed softly shut.
“Would you stay?” He could tell that your own weakness was a threat to you.
The light kept blinking. Red and threatening.
“Just until I can sleep?” You pleaded.
Henry felt his breath fall. He felt himself surrendering piece by piece against his better judgement.
He was too far in now. If he hadn’t already been seen he would be. And he decided it was worth the cost.
He dragged over a chair and sat, too perfectly upright, as if he was holding himself together. His eyes didn't leave your face as you lay there, drifting in and out of the dark crevices of your mind.
He angled his back to the camera. He knew they’d see him, but they didn’t need to see everything. They didn’t need to see the things that were for him alone.
His fingers, cold and unsure as they still were, curled into your palm as you breathed soundlessly in your slumber.
Would you feel it? He both hoped you would and would not.
The red light bored into the back of his head. He knew there would be consequences. Bad ones.
Ones that might take him away from your orbit entirely.
The thought only made his hand tighten around yours. If this was the last time his skin would be graced by the feeling of yours, he was going to hold onto it with every fibre of his being.
Henry remained in his chair for hours.
What were they waiting for? Why hadn’t they come in, seized him?
Was there a chance they still didn’t know?
Regardless, his shift would begin in a few hours. He needed sleep. He could feel it pulling at his edges. The weight of everything he felt suddenly seemed heavier in the dead hours of the night.
He stood up silently, his knees aching. He slid his fingers out of your palm. You didn’t stir. And he wasn’t surprised.
He couldn’t see anyone lurking outside the door through the window.
Curious. Where were the guards?
The door opened with a soft click under his fingers. He slid out into the corridor, somehow even darker, more oppressive at this time of night.
He could feel a looming, pulsing sense of dread as he paced quietly though the halls, as he slipped through the ward doors.
The night felt thicker around every corner. Darker, blacker, a threat growing tighter around his neck.
He was almost at his room when the feeling made his steps falter. A creeping up the back of his spine, stiffening the hairs on the back of his neck.
And with it came the knowledge of what was waiting for him around the corner.
Patiently. Not with a roar but with a sinister, malevolent hum.
He drew in a sharp, decisive breath. He would accept his fate, for now. He would pay the cost of comfort.
He stepped around the corner.
Consequence was waiting for him with white hair and a waistcoat too structured for this time of night. Flanked by two guards who looked thrilled at the prospect of dragging him off.
Why hadn't they come to the infirmary? Why had Brenner waited here for him, in the dark, in the quiet, when he so loved a pantomime?
“Back from your little excursion?” Brenner hissed, his eyes tunnelling into Henry’s.
Henry’s stoic silence was both a defiance and an acceptance, and Brenner knew it.
As the guards grappled Henry's wrists violently into the metal cuffs with an almost cutting force, as Brenner sneered down at him, as he was yanked and dragged away across the linoleum, something resolute settled in his chest.
He was no longer uncertain.
He had stepped inside the labyrinth.
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